What is Satiety: Top 9 Most Filling Foods to Curb Your Hunger
If you’re old enough to remember the iconic potato chip commercial from the 1960’s with the tag line, “Betcha can’t eat just one!” you’re old enough to remember that the advertiser never lost that bet. Not once.
That’s because potato chips are manufactured by food scientists for the main purpose of creating cravings for…well, more chips!
And that’s easy to do because potato chips, gram for gram, are one of the least nutritionally dense foods on Earth, which, as we’ll see, is one of the signatures of craving-based foods.
It all has to do with satiety.
What is Satiety?
The question, “What is satiety?” is relatively easy to answer: it’s the feeling of being full or satisfied. But when it comes to producing that subjective feeling of satisfaction, foods are far from equal, something the manufacturers of highly processed foods like chips are all too aware of.
Their business plan is not to make you satisfied with just a few bites.
Understanding satiety can help you get a handle on both your weight and your metabolic health. Think about it: steak and broccoli fill you up – they’re very satiating, very nutritious, and you’re unlikely to binge on them.
Cheerios, on the other hand, aren’t satiating. That’s why it’s so easy to mindlessly scarf down six bowls of cereal while you’re watching re-runs of Friends.
We know this not only from personal experience, but because it’s been empirically demonstrated. Scientists at the University of Sydney developed something called the Satiety Index to quantify the effect of food on the subjective feeling of fullness. They fed 240 calorie portions of 38 different foods to groups of subjects, asking them to rate their satiety every 15 minutes for 2 hours.
After the 2 hours, the subjects were given access to as much free food as they wanted, from a whole buffet of food and drink options, and the experimenters carefully noted what they ate. Not surprisingly, the amount of food the subjects scarfed down after the initial 120-minute study period correlated negatively with the satiety score of their assigned food.
In other words, if a subject had been given a food with a really low satiety index, they would eat much more food than those who had been given a highly satiating food.
Of the 38 foods tested, the lowest Satiety Index score (37) was produced by – no surprise – the croissant. Boiled potatoes scored the highest for satiety (323).
Macronutrients: The Big Three
Another variable that can impact your sense of fullness is macronutrients. Macronutrients are the big three classes of calorie-containing foods: protein, fat, and carbohydrates.
The most satiating of the macronutrients is protein. That’s why weight loss coaches like myself will often advise folks to start every meal with protein. You get fuller faster and are less likely to overeat.
Nutrient-Dense vs Energy-Dense
Density has to do with how much of something you can pack into a given amount of space.
Remember the old expression “muscle weighs more than fat”? It actually isn’t true. A pound of muscle weighs exactly the same as a pound of fat, just as a pound of feathers weighs the same as a pound of bricks. The difference between the two substances isn’t weight, its density. Pound for pound, bricks take up much less space than feathers.
When a food is considered nutrient–dense, it has a ton of nutrients but not that many calories. Each calorie it contains is densely packed with good stuff. Energy density, on the other hand, means a food is jam-packed with calories but is pretty light on everything else.
Swiss chard is an example of a nutrient-dense food – very few calories and a ton of vitamins. A chocolate donut is a great example of an energy-dense food – dense with calories but nutritionally empty.
Filling Foods
The most satiating foods can be described as high in nutrition, high in protein, high in volume, and low in calories, while the most “fattening” foods are the opposite – high in calories and low in everything else.
Satiety has long been thought to be a key reason why low carb diets perform so well in weight-loss studies comparing different diets, even when calories are kept constant. That’s because low-carb foods are much harder to overeat.
9 Most Filling Foods to Curb Hunger & Promote Satiety
The following nine foods all score high on the Satiety Index and help to curb hunger. Also, all nine of them are nutritious enough to be listed in my book, The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth.
Protein
- Beef
- Chicken
- Fish
- Eggs
Beef, chicken, fish, and eggs are all superb sources of protein, and score high on both the PDCAA and the DIASS scales, widely used measures of protein quality that look at amino acid composition and digestibility.
Starches/Cereals
- Boiled Potatoes
- Oatmeal
Potatoes came into disfavor when low-carb foods became really popular, but they’re actually not a “bad” food. Boiled potatoes placed first among 38 foods tested for satiety by researchers at the University of Sydney.
One study found that people who ate a meat and vegetables meal with potatoes as a starch felt much more satisfied (and much less hungry) than those who ate the same meal with either pasta or rice. And here’s a bonus for you: put your cooked potatoes (boiled or baked) in the refrigerator overnight and the next day you’ve got a great source of resistant starch, a third type of fiber proving extremely beneficial to humans.
Fruit
- Apples
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” goes under the heading of “stuff my grandmother was right about.” Apples contain vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, pectin (fiber), and a lot of water, making them a high volume, nutrient-dense, low-calorie food. No wonder they’re satiating!
Beans and Legumes
- Baked Beans
While food manufacturers have been marketing grains as a good source of fiber for decades, bread is a fiber lightweight compared to beans. Beans are one of the highest fiber foods you can eat, ranging from about 6-8 grams per half cup (bread typically has only 1-3 grams per slice). Beans are also extremely high in antioxidants and are the perfect example of a “slow carb” – baked beans, for example, have a glycemic load of only 7!
Vegetables
- Broccoli
Broccoli – along with Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, and a few others – is a member of the brassica family of vegetable royalty. Among its many benefits, broccoli is loaded with nutrients, low in calories, impossible to overeat, and is very filling. It’s also a great source of sulforaphane, an incredibly important plant chemical which, according to the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, helps neutralize toxins, calms inflammation and may even help block the growth of some cancers!
The above foods are hard to overeat and are pretty much binge-proof. They also provide a lot of nutrition for a relatively small number of calories.
You’ll be doing your health and your metabolism a big favor by putting them on heavy rotation in your diet.
You Don’t Always Need to Be Satiated
Satiety doesn’t always need to be the goal of eating.
While feeling full can be a pleasant feeling, it doesn’t take much to tip that good
feeling into “stuffed” territory, which can be decidedly unpleasant.
The fact is, a little bit of hunger might actually be good for us.
In Okinawa – one of the five Blue Zones where healthy centenarians abound – they have
a saying that expresses their attitude about eating: Hari Hatchi Bu.
It means: “Push away from the table when you’re 80% full.”
We’d all do well to pay attention to this time-honored saying!
At BrainMD, we’re dedicated to providing the highest purity nutrients to improve your physical health and overall well-being. For more information about our full list of brain healthy supplements, please visit us at BrainMD.
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